ANGEL DRAGGED HERSELF ONTO THE BEACH OF THE LAST
deserted cay before Bermuda and plopped her tail in the sand. Forget heading home. She wasn’t up for it. Physi-cally, mentally, emotionally.
All she’d wanted was to prove to her brother that she had what it took to do the job. And look what her life had turned into…
Yeah, she’d proved something all right. She’d proved that she was so unqualified to do the job it was laugh-able, and worse than that, that she didn’t know as much about Humans as she thought she did.
Great. Her degree, her thesis, her life’s work… all of it wasted.
If Logan was too hardheaded to give her a chance to explain, well, then, no wonder the planet was in the shape it was in. Stubborn, prejudiced…
Oh who was she kidding?
She missed him like Hades. Last night had been per-fect… Until she’d gotten out of that bed.
He’d wanted her; he cared about her. He’d said he was falling for her. They could have had something to-gether. But she’d blown it.
A tear fell onto one of her scales, amethyst shim-mering through the perfect, round drop until another splashed it away. Then another.
Tears. She was shedding tears for a Human.
She brushed them away. She was not going to cry over him.
But the tears didn’t stop. Silent, heartbreakingly si-lent, they fell onto her tail, mingling with the saltwater, back into their element. As she was.
Gods. He’d been so disappointed. So… angry.
So hurtful.
A crab came scuttling across the sand toward her, one of his claws waving as if she were here on a state visit. She shook her head and flicked her fingers to send him back where he came from. She wasn’t up for small talk, and the fish carcass he was dragging held no appeal.
After taking an elaborate bow, the crab turned shell and ran away.
And, yes, so maybe she’d done the same thing, but could anyone blame her?
Especially after the way Logan had reacted. She hadn’t tried to enchant him; how could he believe that of her? Last night had been so different from the kiss in the kitchen—didn’t it mean anything to him?
Making love with him had been so perfect; how could it not be special to him? How could he not get beyond her tail to realize that? They’d fit together, their bodies in perfect harmony, creating music all their own. She hadn’t sung a note. Love had made last night what it was. Wonderful. Special. Beautiful.
Another tear fell onto the back of her hand. How could he turn what had happened between them into something dark and ugly?
She picked up a handful of white sand and tossed it onto her flukes. So what if she was a Mer? She was a woman. One he’d felt something for, dammit. There
was no faking that. What-in-Hades difference did it make if she had a tail? She certainly didn’t look at him and say, “Oh yeah, he’d do if he could only lose the leg thing.”
She sniffed back another round of tears. Why couldn’t Humans accept people as they were instead of putting labels on them? Notice the similarities instead of the differences?
She flipped the sand off her flukes and washed them in the gentle waves, scrubbing at her eyes. Her amethyst scales were pretty, not something to be ashamed of, dammit.
Good thing she hadn’t considered giving it up—es-pecially not for him, the hogsheaded, stuck-in-the-sand, stubborn son-of-a—
Angel fell back to rest on her elbows and looked at the calm ripple of the sea’s surface. The truth was, she might have.
Gods, what did that say about her? Half—if not all— of her life seemed to have been defined by conforming to others’ views and expectations of her. Angel, the student? Check. Angel, the Human-crazy Mer? Got that covered. Angel, the two-legged babysitter? Yep.
Angel, who’d destroyed the veil of secrecy that had shrouded their race for millennia?
Sadly, that, too, was her.
She sniffled again. The thing was, they were her. All of them. But she was so much more than that. She was a compilation of life events and wishes and dreams and purpose and determination and…
And lies.
Yeah. That. She’d lied to him.
Her head fell back, and she closed her eyes. A liar. She’d been reduced to lying about who she was. Reduced to skulking around to find some way to wiggle into the job she wanted. Granted, Rod should interview her like he did everyone else, but she, too, should have gone about applying for the job like everyone else did— in ways not designed to break the rules and subvert tried and true Mer practices.
She deserved everything she’d gotten—or hadn’t gotten. She flung her arms out to her sides and fell back against the sand, the sun warming her, and she remem-
bered Mariana’s suggestion about getting burned.
The pain in her heart was more searing than any ray of the sun.
Gods… Logan. How could it have gone so wrong?
And Michael… She’d promised him she’d be there this morning, and now she’d made a liar out of herself with that, too. The poor kid had been through so much already…
A wave came out of nowhere to splash over her, salty drops sprinkling her face. Ah, the irony of the Universe flinging her tears back at her.
Okay, already. She got it. She should have kept to the original plan of observing and not gotten involved. It was all her own fault.
So what was she going to do about it?
Angel grabbed two handfuls of sand. Do? What could she do? Logan had made his point perfectly clear, and she was not a glutton for punishment. She wasn’t going to do anything. That stupid conscience of hers could just take a permanent vacation some place cold. Like Antarctica. Angel didn’t want to hear anything from it ever again.
Yet here she floated, moaning and giving up. Was that really what she wanted to do for the rest of her life?
Not really. But Rod certainly wasn’t going to give her the job now, and what else could she do? She’d left her notes in Logan’s guesthouse, and there was no way to fix this. Logan didn’t want to listen; she’d lied to him and had—albeit inadvertently—bewitched him. He had a valid point. Several, in fact.
And Rod was sure to point out—not that he needed to because she was certainly aware of that fact now—that if she could screw up something like this, something so important to her, so personal, what did it say about her ability to handle the big-ticket items like world peace and interspecies integration?
No. She was done. She’d turn in her degree along with her aspirations and find something else to do. Salvage work maybe.
At least her Human knowledge would be good for something.